from South on your
right.Game All, Pairs, you are third to speak in the West seat and
hold - 865 AKQJ8754 108. The bidding starts Pass from your
partner, 1 from South on your
right.
(1) What do you bid?
(2) Say you bid 4
, your LHO
Blackwoods, RHO bids 5
(two key cards
+ trump queen), LHO bids 6 passed out,
partner having stayed silent. What do you lead?
(3) Suppose instead South opened 1NT, not 1, and the contract is 6 played
by North - what do you lead?
On the bitterly cold morning of the County Pairs Final I unwisely played some outdoor tennis and unfortunately pulled a small muscle in my shoulder. Was that an omen? On the only previous occasion that Ann & I'd won the County Pairs I had pulled a muscle that very morning (a calf muscle, and I was hobbling around for several days). Well, omen or not, we certainly had a following wind this time and were fortunate enough to win with 59.29%, just ahead of Graham Dolan & Ben Tarlow (58.05%) and Kevin Smith & Joanne Caldwell (57.96%).
That earlier problem. The full hand was
|
|||||||||||||||||||
At some tables, after Pass-1, West
bid 4, allowing Norths a reasonable
Blackwood route to 6 by South. At at
least one table West bid only 3.
However, Ann is made of sterner stuff and went straight in with
5, which really fixed North, who
understandably settled for 5, and a
fine result for us.
Question 2 is quite interesting - do you go for the
brilliancy and underlead your diamonds, hoping to get partner
in for the spade ruff back? It always works in newspaper
articles but on this occasion 6 by
South is solid and all that happens is you concede the
overtrick. Actually, you still get some matchpoints because one
West made a Lightner double, forgetting he was on lead!
Oh, and question 3? This was quite comical. I don't know the
sequence but at one table North declared 6, not South. Forgetting that he was not on lead, West led
A out of turn. The Director explained
to North his five options, one of which was to prohibit a
diamond lead. You've guessed it - North took this option, East
led a spade...one off! Was the A a
sort of Lightner lead?
An interesting ending developed on this hand at one table:
|
|||||||||||||||||||
At most tables East (the dealer) opened with a weak 2 or a Multi 2.
This made the N/S hands very hard to bid, and few pairs reached
the reasonable slams. However, at one table East passed and N/S
had a free run, eventually landing in 6NT by South, which is
quite a decent spot. The 4 was led.
Declarer ran the clubs, pitching hearts from dummy, West
throwing one spade and (significantly?) the 9-J of hearts, then
took two rounds of diamonds. If the diamonds are breaking he
should obviously just continue diamonds. But if declarer judges
that LHO had four diamonds originally, he must not play a third
diamond at this point: he should finesse the Q, cash the A and endplay West
with the third spade to lead into South's diamond tenace.
Unfortunately he took the first line and now had to go one
off.
Many thanks to Philip Wraight for organising and directing the event with his usual calm efficiency, and once again we all appreciated having the hands prepared by the Duplimate machine with hand records available after each session. The Fulbourn Community College was a pleasant place to play - an improvement, surely, on the hall at Comberton, which is dank and has erratic heating.
K75